56 Women Journalists Everyone Should Read

Until this week, you probably didn’t know or care who Gay Talese is — unless you’re a writer or a superfan of literary nonfiction, the genre he helped pioneer in the 1960s along with a bunch of other white guys and Joan Didion. This week he was “all over Twitter” after failing to name any women writers who have inspired him and then asking a contemporary writer about her nails.

Talese deserves the backlash. When it comes to naming influential women nonfiction writers of the past several decades, though, most of us fare only slightly better than he did. There are a few women who pop up in this canon — Didion, of course. Nora Ephron. Susan Orlean. I’ve read them, and I love them. But there simply aren’t very many of them. The anthologies of great narrative reporting feature scant female bylines. And it’s not just older books. Ira Glass’s egregiously titled 2007 anthology, The New Kings of Nonfiction, has a gender ratio (2 women of 14) that’s as bad as the classic collections.

I’d always assumed this was partly because women, for decades, have missed out on the best writing assignments. If a magazine won’t give you a big budget and many months to spend hanging out with Frank Sinatra or reconstructing a crime scene, you can’t produce this type of work. But after Talese’s remarks, I started to wonder: Is it really true that almost no women were writing powerful narrative nonfiction before the 2000s?

And so I went hunting for one good piece of nonfiction by a different woman writer published in every year since 1960, the year Esquire first published Talese. It was difficult. Most of this stuff just isn’t well archived digitally. And yes, far fewer women were working as magazine journalists in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

But they were there.

I found them — one for each of the past 56 years. And I was ashamed. Despite the fact that I graduated from journalism school, own several nonfiction anthologies, and am an avid reader of magazines, this was the first time I read much of their work. It was the first time I’d even seen many of their names. The male bylines I scrolled past in decades-old tables of contents were familiar, either because those men are still working their prestigious jobs today, or because they have been anthologized. Most of the women nonfiction writers of previous eras, I discovered after some Googling, had short-lived journalistic careers. And the excellent work they did produce has escaped every curator of the past several decades. We simply haven’t remembered them. And it’s time we start.

That’s exactly what this list is: a start. It is far from perfect. Not all of the writing is available online, though I included links when I could. The list skews American, and it certainly skews white. There are still many writers, and entire books and publications, that I missed. (For example, many black women writers published their work in outlets like the ChicagoDefender, which are not archived online. And many of Ebony’s great profiles from the ’60s and ’70s are not bylined.) Especially in the modern era, I made admittedly arbitrary choices about whom to include, though I tried to prioritize reported nonfiction over memoir. Importantly, every woman on this list has written much more than the single story I’ve provided.

And so, by every metric, think of this as a beginning, not a definitive declaration. It’s an attempt to balance out a nonfiction canon that has, since Talese’s heyday, lazily excluded women and repeated the same five writers’ names over and over. It also makes for some great reading.